Don't Sacrifice Principles for Unjust War With Iraq

To the editors:

I love my country and much of my work is about the struggle to realize the ideas of equality set out in the Declaration of Independence and the post-Civil War amendments to our Constitution. But nothing since President Nixon’s sudden expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia, which led to the destruction of another society, has made me so ashamed of our national leaders as the war we are about to start in Iraq. I am ashamed of the act of starting a war against a country that has neither attacked nor immediately threatened us and of the very dangerous principle on which the act seems to be based—that we have a unilateral right to begin a war against any country that cannot prove to us that it has no highly dangerous weapons, no matter what the rest of the world thinks. Since we obviously would not accord that right to anyone else, it rests on an assumption that we are good by definition and those we attack are evil. I make no case for the miserable Iraqi leaders, but there have always been authoritarian governments with dangerous weapons and plans to get even more dangerous ones and that has not been a justification for starting a war.

And it is the worst kind of hubris to adopt principles of actions that we are neither prepared or able to enforce uniformly or to live with if enforced against ourselves or any of our allies. Beyond the recklessness of our government in opening this Pandora’s box, acting without any consensus in our country, and separating ourselves from so many of our allies, I am appalled by the manipulation of language, the incredible self-righteousness of our leaders, the violation of religious principles of just war, the undermining of international institutions that the world badly needs, and the cowardice of many of our Senators and Congresspeople who know better but have read too many polls and sacrifice principle to popularity. I hope that students will make their voices heard in this time because they and their generation will reap the whirlwind we set in motion with this action.

Gary A. Orfield
Feb. 9, 2003

The writer is Professor of Education & Social Policy and Co-Director of the Civil Rights Project at the Graduate School of Education.